James | Port Chalmers, Otago

**This story refers to child sexual abuse. For specialised help, with any issues relating to sexual harm, contact Safe to talk: 0800 044 334 or text 4334**

“It’s a great question, and it’s quite fresh. I wrestle with depression, and self-esteem issues, and I quite often don’t realise how depleted I am in some essentials. Anyway last night I had a sense of pride and it was in one of those sort of high sleep inner-dialogues.

I’m a contemporary artist, and I had a good day in the studio where I was very still, and I was penning, I just made narratives around reactions to the pandemic, and the kind of political implications of authoritarian, global fear-mongering, state terror, you might say, and the implications of a controlled currency crash and state dependency, and a lot of the bugaboos of this war. I penned some really cool lyrics that tied my fear of living in psychopathy – because my community was in a state housing area when I was a kid, and my dad was officially a schizophrenic, but he was also quite a scary Christian, and there was quite a bit of mind-play, psychopathy literally. The man went into some institution. So, I’m a survivor of quite horrendous mental and emotional psychological abuse as a kid, not to mention some other sexual abuse that happened as well. This is normal New Zealand stuff and so I’m very attuned to psychopathy, and feeling bullied, and New Zealand, in especially the art world, is a great sensor of reality. 

I find it very hard to locate my true voice. I’m very known for very large expressive content, but I find it hard to own myself, because I’m so censored. My experience of being abused is not something polite, repressive New Zealand wants to know about, and I think there’s a lot of damage in New Zealand, especially in working class Māori families. Any kind of solo parent situation where there’s addiction, loss of meaning, and especially as a man, feminism has done nothing for my self-esteem, in terms of a place. So the arts has been completely academically colonised by a constant tide of feminist, neo-liberal um, brain-washing, because if you destroy men, you also get to own the culture. So there’s a lot at play in my kōrero. 

But anyway, I made a few drawings yesterday and I felt really proud of myself, because at least I made my work for me, and it wasn’t reactive. It was honest, and I smiled and said, you know, you may be a big silly kidult, with the weight of the world on your soldiers, and you’re a paranoid, but you can still own yourself and like that darkness. This is the world. It is a spiritual crucible, and between fear and love and extinction, there is only the journey of the soul, and the wounded healer, the archetype of the hero, and being redeemed by the pressures of one’s vocation. So, I take art very seriously. It’s a shamanic act. It’s a spiritual act, and it’s about finding your own voice. Not language, not words, not written, but a sense of ancestry, and so I made some silly little pictures yesterday, and I felt proud of myself. Thanks for asking the question.”